Regression
by Last of Romance
Summary: "To some, indulgence was devouring an entire box of chocolate in one sitting. To Sanji, it had been the sight of Zoro's body. He had thought himself purged of the fascination, the craving for a man that he believed he had long starved out of his mind." Sanji self-indulgence, ZoSan (in retrospect).


Regress:

Zoro's neck arched his head back as a quiet groan escaped his parted lips, obscured and silenced beneath the thundering divides wrought by the waves of a tropical storm. There was no way of knowing whose cries bore more resonance, the amassing swells of ocean waters or the indistinct voice within the man that pressed him harder, pressed him further and _more_ into the strain of his most severe training session yet. His body moved forth with the motions of his hands, each upward hoist of his weights found the muscles in his body clenched as if each clang of metal were the force of his inner will fighting against him, moving him like a stringed puppet to react accordingly. He moved as if pushed by the waves of the ocean and carried up onto the shore; he moved like the tides dragging him back out into the sea to drown into himself, into mindless rhythms, back and forth, back and forth.

This was his outlet. Akin to another man's music or shipbuilding or cooking - or a woman's mapmaking or archelogical finds - but underrated for what it was. Each raise of his arms was another part of the narrative of his dream, like any other, that worked him tirelessly and unkindly, yet carried him on and forward in a nearly infinite strength. It was like great sex, dreams could sometimes be, seeming subject to be changeable as much as they were enduring constants, met with sudden rushes that climbed upwards and built to a grand apex of a coming true. These things could rise up high enough to shatter through the voice of higher reason, but sometimes merely clattered to the ground like so many broken fragments of emotions, used up and expired.

But Zoro pressed on and on, on and on, on and on - male adrenaline singing through his body, the world lost to him as he worked himself harder beneath the pelt of rainfall. It washed away the sweat and the pain; he counted higher than ever before, willing his muscles to quiet when they wanted to scream.

The reality of the sentiment was shared by only one other man.

Eyes colored like the sky and brimmed with the darkness of storm clouds ran over his sculpted physique, wiping away his sweat and peeling back rain-saturated clothing and caressing every inch of his wet flesh. Zoro continually worked harder still, a self-flagellation likely from some long ago near-defeat in his head that coaxed his body to just be a little bit stronger, arms trembling in strain, whilst accidentally and unwittingly playing the role of exhibitionist. But the ship and its crew were incidental to him for the moment as he emitted yet another groan, a castle in the sky to one man that it may come in the form of his name...

Sanji. One more time... just one more time, Sanji couldn't help but to look at him, despite that 'one more time' had passed several glances ago out the window.

It had been nothing but pure derision in the beginning that had brought him to stare out from the library windows and down to the deck, insult rolling about in the back of his head as he replaced his favored cookbook back upon its ambiguous place on the shelf. How long had it been since he'd last seen Zoro train like this? Some months and some years had passed since he'd even so much as dared to let his gaze linger over the form of the man below. It was a only an impetuous decision that he do it again, knowing the truth subconsciously yet immovable in his horrid denial that anything involving this man beyond a petty spat would have the power to touch him after the passage of time. That is to say, he thought himself desensitized to the unsurpassed eroticism that Zoro could sometimes emanate in his every movement.

Oh, but he had been so wrong. So very, very wrong.

To some, indulgence was devouring an entire box of chocolate in one sitting. To Sanji, it had been the sight of Zoro's body. He had thought himself purged of the fascination, the craving for a man that he believed he had long starved out of his mind after months of mentally laying himself out on his new version of a large rock, stranded in the middle of the ocean, somewhere apart from those thoughts.

But the moment he had seen Zoro after their two year detachment, as his extraordinary legs carried him with all of his animal grace towards where he stood on the Sabaody shore, Sanji knew that he was lost, utterly arrested by how time had done the other man far too many favors in terms of masculinity. Outwardly, he was fled of anything but the fallback material of insults, while deep down inside, he was like a fly in a spider's web, his tiny mental legs and wings flailing for freedom of movement when all other things in his reality had come to a momentary standstill. The sight of him had brought Sanji's breath to a halt, eyes wide and his stomach aflutter with rekindled needs, long-suppressed. Even months later, that memory brought his bottom lip between the ridges of his front teeth as his hands fumbled in undoing his shirt and tossing it to the floor, scarce moments before he slid the leather of his belt apart from its buckle. The button of his pants popped apart.

Once upon a time, clothes had never been a necessity between himself and Zoro. Not ever.

He lay back, draping himself over the wrap-around couch in the relative privacy of the library; anyone could come in, but he felt assured that they wouldn't in the wake of the storm. But vaguely irate, still, at the possibility of being seen by anyone who didn't happen to be Zoro. For the moment - to hell with anyone else, the ship, the crew, their dreams and whatever may be their conclusions. Oh, the swordsman would have been absolutely infuriated if he heard those sorts of words ever spoken, but that was what made the thought so appealing to Sanji. It wasn't as if he really meant it at all; he really didn't; those things truly did mean the world to him, after all. But even then, who actually _cared_ anymore what he thought? No one did - particularly not Zoro.

He wished for a moment that he still did. He could almost vaguely recall such a point in time, but it seemed so far away and so long ago that it was no more than a muddied reverie - stolen of all luster and lost and buried to the steadily falling grit of time's sand. But somewhere it had happened, hadn't it? He could somehow remember the complex look in the man's eyes accompanying the arrogant curl of his smiling lips before the claiming of his own mouth and the claiming of his virtue itself. He could remember the lovely contour of Zoro's throat that vibrated low purrs of satisfaction for things that Sanji could do to him that put his blood on the boil - things that Zoro had taught him in low whispers against the shell of his ear. He could remember the severe carving of the other man's muscles in all of its places that tasted absolutely divine beneath a venerating and dutiful mouth.

It wasn't much of a dream or a fantasy, anymore; it was the most provocative, reoccurring nightmare of things just as lost to history after Zoro had severed their relationship with no explanation, with no apologies, with no small anythings for Sanji's desperate arms to gather to himself for comfort as he fumbled against the rejections to his advances for some answer. Something. Anything at all. But there was _nothing_.

It really had happened, hadn't it?

Sanji's darkened gaze watched the swordsman with a mix of misery and arousal, both feelings feeding the other in their separate needs. The need for love, the need for sex, the need to be kissed - a wretched commingling so tired in avariciousness and he knew it, yet he immersed himself in them out of self-deprecation and spite. A pink tongue played over his lips, gently circling moisture over their suddenly cracked surface as he toyed with the loosed buttons of his pants. His conscious mind was intent on every movement of the man beyond the window in the sway of his reps and the determined glint in his deep and unfathomable, perplexing eyes.

 _Zoro_...

Man who had once made him feel desirable when no one else had, who so considerately sat with him over a cup of coffee in the mornings while Sanji made breakfast, who was unashamed to kiss him open-mouthed in broad daylight, who fingered through his every thought the same way he fingered through the luxurious cascade of his blond hair. That same hair that he later ripped through as he fucked him hard from behind, a handful of pale locks twisted in calloused fingers as a crude means for leverage.

Blond locks that could never be bleached of the memory of the way they looked when they pillowed against the torso of the man he once pledged his heart to wholly.

The man who made him feel like used-up trash, discarded and unwanted - damaged goods in their lonely box, shaken and broken despite the large 'fragile' lettering underlined across his love.

Sanji refused to believe that any change he'd made in his life; here and there, slow and steady self-improvements; or that the unfolding buds of doubts that blossomed an endless spray throughout his head and his heart had anything to do with Zoro. No, not at all, because he wasn't worth the trouble. Stop thinking on it and just forget him. He was, and will always be, nothing. It was just a teenage fling, just about the sex, just an amazing fuck, just... just...

Just a man who still permeated his thoughts more than two years later. A memory clinging to him like old skin that lacked any new growth underneath - flaked and dried on, to peel it back would only invite a fresh swelling of blood. No. No more. Leave it be. After all, why make new memories of new lovers who would only bring more pain when that one tidal wave alone, that one deluge of heartache had already inundated him beneath a outpouring of anguish given liquid form.

Like the falling rain-

 _ **Regress**_.

Again, the same man on the same deck, training with the same enormous weights, ones far lighter than the burden he shouldered every day. The same former lover, scorned, laying against the library's wrap-around couch and the same two hands that lay folded in deliberation. _Touch yourself, pretend its_ _ **Him**_ _\- you know how you like it, just the way that_ _ **He**_ _did_. And the wiser part of him, _Stop it, stop it, stop thinking about it and stop torturing yourself_. The mind between fingertips tormented in those actions - made Sanji's head spin like a fast rotation of the soldier dock, spinning from channel to channel.

A paddle boat, a shark, a horse; channel two, a reminder of those better times, long ago. A means to carry him off to the shores of his own self-made deserted island, otherwise known as _regression_.

Because somehow, lust always speaks so much louder than the voice of reason - perhaps a more inviting territory. Better tourism, better attractions, and a guaranteed seat in the audience for the live showing of your own depravity.

Enjoy your stay.

Battle lost, one hand shifted beneath a fold of cloth, grasping a firm hold around his half-erect cock as blue eyes narrowed, riveted on the man outside who had steadfastly and repetitiously threw his whole body into his training exercise. Abusing muscles that Sanji knew were strained. Groaning in what Sanji knew was pain.

( _Grinding what Sanji knew was hard. Moaning in what Sanji knew was pleasure_ ).

It used to always be about pleasure with the swordsman - his exact motions and exact slashes and exact cuts for his exacting desires that Sanji could so easily satisfy with the same hand that now gripped a hold of his own arousal, coaxing it to life with a slowness that they'd never possessed, he and Zoro. Slow, as if in hesitation and nervous apprehension of summoning the spirits of a passion long dead, a recipe almost forgotten but the ingredients were always the same... always the very same...

Always the way _He_ liked it.

To delve right into the motions sans the teasing glide of fingertips - merely one traipse through the damp slit at the tip before slender hips began to roll into the grip of his hand in perfect time to the numbers that the other man murmured, counting upwards. Lightning flashed somewhere in a peripheral horizon, coloring the sky in a moment of pure white across all gray downpour, not like the greens, the blues, yellows, the blacks; the contrast of tanned skin against pale, or the shade of red that once decorated the apples of Sanji's cheeks. The color representative of passion, the color suggestive of heat... he could feel it gathering between his thighs, burning hotter and faster with every curl of his wrist working rock-hard skin through his loose fist.

"How do you still do this to me?" Sanji softly inquired between soft noises caught deep in his throat as his lust-darkened gaze burned a gleaming once-over across Zoro's image, distorted with water sliding down the windowpane. His tongue slipped from between the sensuality of his lips, painting the lower a glistening coat of lusciousness as if it were possible to seduce the other man from that high-above place where he couldn't see.

In a place where an air of desperation commingled with the masculine scent of arousal, equating to something wholly covetous and depraved in Sanji's expression. His hair fell wilted against his curled brow as his hips canted just as much as his hands guided himself through the ritual of self-gratification. Of self-deprecation at it's highest echelons. In such throes, Sanji was beyond caring.

Just like _Him_.

"How...?" He repeated, the remainder of his words lost in a breathless digression of feeling above all thought. Feeling with heart and mind rather than his eyes as they fluttered as frantically as his heart until the moment his vision failed him - akin to any amount of resolve he'd once possessed, that word, _failed_. But to give in... To give in to _Him_ , to the admittance of denying _Him_ , was nearly as powerful of an aphrodisiac as the erotic memories he began to play through in his mind when all other visuals were lost to a shipwrecked perception.

He drew the image of Zoro into his thoughts in the way his body paid such perfect compliment to Sanji's own as they lay side by side, naked and exposed and spent under both moon and morning light. The way they _melded_ more than they'd ever _fucked_ , like some sacred rite of teenage indulgence. A fervent partaking of sweat and semen, of lust and love that permeated through wooden grain as they twisted together across the threshold of a ship that was now gone away to funerary fire.

The way Zoro would lay him prone beneath the shade of the mikan trees, whispering to him darkly of things that the blond would normally find too distasteful in verbalization rather than action. But it was all about immorality and decadence, tranquil purrs of satisfaction in the same mellow cadence used to bring the common enemy weak to their knees in fear. Only this - that - was a passion that was genuinely heartfelt, pulled from one bodily manipulation after another as Zoro frequently aspired to discover new ways to drive Sanji utterly mad.

And always did.

The way **Sanji** liked it.

Fast and then slow, hard and then gentle... a perfect mess of physical and emotional discordance that felt both cruel and wonderfully exhilarating at once. It was the way that _they_ liked it, and it reflected down to the way Sanji's body gently writhed against the cushions, a ghost of a submissive without his counterpart that could only be portrayed by the shadow of an aggressive hand. Lips parted, he breathed deeply as his free arm curled around the couch's back. First to grip, and then to claw, palm splaying against the refreshingly cool window glass as he whispered his lover/nakama's name in varying repetitions.

 _Marimo. Kuso kenshi._ _ **Zoro**_.

Spoken both in his mind and aloud over the background music of rain striking windowpane like a ceaseless metronome... and into the intervals of his breathing... much too loud in his ears, into the off beats of the erratic motions of his hand - without any real sense of rhythm. Furiously and overly passionate. He knew that Zoro would have loved him now, this way, too. A quintessential of erotic imagery and the most beautiful mess that anyone could imagine. His lips remained parted after so many soft moans and one reiteration after another of guilty reverence; eyes squeezed tightly shut, as if shielding himself from the brightest rays of sunlight. Pale hair clumping together with sweat, clinging to his face and to the back of his neck almost unbearably. At the heights of his passion and mixed desperation, the moments that seemed too long and yet far too short before he would orgasm into his own hand, he knew this is where Zoro's love for him had always lingered.

Ravaged, not by heart but by body alone. Used, but never expired. His shelf life enduring and the contents of his packaging in a cycle of constant replenish with every emotional spill. But perhaps the flavor of love was too rich for one who could only ever palette the mediocrity of bland affairs.

Despite that Sanji was firm in his belief that he'd never find forgiveness in himself for the other man, he was, nevertheless, breaking apart for him once again. As the first symptomatic twitches and spasms wracked his body, it was two hands and not one that pulled him forward. Fingers that touched, sparked together as they interlocked and slicked themselves to glisten in bled-out passion.

Zoro always had such beautiful hands, a swordsman's hands, and Sanji's eyes bleared open to stare at them in indelicate fascination as they worked to his undoing. For his want and need, want and need, _want you_ and _need you_ that paired with the love that fueled his fantasies, what was only one burning desire in origin became absolute necessity. His hand, Zoro's hand. A cook's hand, a swordsman's hand. Not so dissimilar at all. One heartbeat, thundering loud enough in his ears for two. His body took to a disgraceful shuddering before he came in hot pulses that spurted over his chest and stomach, whilst he professed mumbled words of devotion to the ears of no one - to himself.

To a completely anti-climatic climax.

Breathing, Sanji tossed his head to the side as his chest rose and fell in shallow heaves, and he allowed his hand to rest in the trail of his own mess - he didn't care, and in a strictly perverse and bordering upon narcissistic way, he enjoyed it. His own cum, his own body... was something he had always been comfortable with. Something that never changed, just as much as his hair, his brows, or the way he dressed, was physiology that only one other man had truly known and praised unto perfection without sullying it with false hopes in the way he had with heart.

No, wishes of the body had always, _always_ , been granted in one form or another - the most wonderful disgrace that Sanji had ever experienced.

Not like this. Sated, yet still unfulfilled and every bit as aggravated as before. Dreamy and lethargic in the ebb and flow of post-orgasmic tides, his skin tingled with curious warmth between his thighs and in his belly and set into his pores... but it wasn't enough. While one half of his mind dictated that he'd never feel satisfied until it was _Him_ who needed him back again, the other half insisted that it was entirely based upon something physical and sometimes enough is just never enough. To combine both appraisals would have made the most logical sense; his body longed for another body in combined heat, writhing together as two, connecting in every which way to become _whole_. Maybe, in such light, it might not have mattered whose body it actually belonged to as it ravaged his own, so long as they were hot and passionate, and knew when it was time to be gentle and time to be rough.

But Sanji had never been a man of middle grounds.

With an elbow propping his weight up and a roll of the head to the side, he turned his eyes towards the window again - towards his proverbial low road - and rest in quiet deliberation upon and the rain-sodden man who would forever hold his heart in repetitious motions that Sanji eyed with contempt.

 _How?_ he silently wondered once more as his fingertips danced across his stomach, smearing trails of his evident failure in self-control.

No answer came forth to both ears and mind alike, merely an unanswered small question of incomprehension that rendered Sanji immobile as he realized its remaining fragments like a shot to the head, a spike nailed into his chest –

No matter how hard he tried to hold Zoro in his lowest regards, to bury him under sands of time gone wet and muddied and dark with the stigma of love's scorn, no matter how scoffed as nothing more than a frivolous affair as unimportant as any other shallow liaison he'd indulged in - of course, he'd had so many of them before on islands far and wide, it was too easy to drop anything into that narrow categorization - and no matter how many times struck with mental invective –

They were lies.

Zoro, useless man with useless wants and needs, wants and needs, _want you_ and _need you_... useless in his determination and in his exceptional compassion that he used to fill the gaping pit - a rift not unlike the ocean's divide between island and ship - where he housed his massive ego.

Somehow, even then, Sanji could only really see the image of his moss-headed shipmate in impunity.

A man of extraordinary body and animal grace, stretching his endurance thin with hours of unrepentant flexing of his upper-arm strength and muttering out yet another number that Sanji would make-believe as his own name. The enemies he fought would all fall before him, stumble in his wake, cut through cleanly and easily to the bone more by the mere glint hanging sharp in his eye than a katana's edge. The way he liked it. The way they liked it. The way Sanji liked it. Seeming as though metal in his hands gave new life to him, brought out the immortally beautiful demon of him, shaped by the taste and texture of his blood lust. The strength of his resolve, that force that drew all eyes around him into a one-dimensional flight of fantasy that he had made his reality.

And his inadvertent eroticism - the indecent curve of his hips controlling the unfaltering movements of his step, ones that resounded across his every aftermath to the beating of Sanji's heart - with every swallow of his mouth gone dry, lips parched, eyes salivating - nostalgic like an old wanted poster on the wall of their quarters that lacked a slashed-out eye socket, lost to time.

As thought missing one-half of a great love, lost to time.

That portrait became a test of will and inevitable self-degradation as Sanji would lose himself again only to Zoro's image, immortalized forever in the shape of a teenage boy. The way Sanji remembered the man that used to want him as he did, reaching for him late at night. His neck arching his head back into inaudible moans, two eyes turned towards the starry sky, capturing their sparkle within pupil and iris and cornea to serve someday as mirrors that Sanji might play witness to his own tumble into self-deceit once more.

The way _He_ liked it.

With the thunders of a fierce storm, the rain plummeted onward into yet another sea of regression.

* * *

If this looks at all familiar (though I doubt it will), that is because it was written ages ago (and by ages, I mean nearly 10 years ago). :P I didn't post it anywhere but to my LJ, so its been more than a little lost in time. I've revised this largely, went time-skip, and am pleased with the result. This originally came about over two words stuck in my head: "depravity" and "degradation".


End file.
